A student’s perspective #Grads4nottm

Part 2 The company

   Log of how the week passed


Day 1

Information pack given

Information pack given

Following some careful navigation to the Boots site, on the outskirts of Nottingham. I was welcomed into a large room with a lot of other students. After a short wait, we were introduced to a manager working at Boots and a recent graduate working in Nottingham. They both gave us a small speech on how they managed to get into their jobs and about the benefits of working in Nottingham.


After these came a few ice-breaker  activities and a small welcome pack before we were introduced to our companies. It was an exciting moment, as we didn't know which company had issued which challenges. [I’m assuming this was probably to stop bias at the application stage as there was a mix between small and large companies and everyone would want to work for a big one.]  The company I was working for was a medium sized logistics company called Prolog, and I wasn’t the only one. After talking to our team leaders, Tim and Matt (Prolog), I found out I was working with a group of people doing other challenges.

 The group was consisted of:

Megan – Project Manager
Ryan, Michael and Sam – responsible for the SWOT analysis
Jason and Kwadwo working on web design
Me – responsible for benchmarking


After our initial face to face and a brief overview of the company, my team and I left after swapping numbers and arranging how to get to Prolog the next day.


 Day 2- 4


Waking up early, at 6 am I prepared myself for a long day. My new team had decided the day before that we would go together to Prolog in Megan’s car early the next morning. [ All participants’ commutes were different, depending on the company they worked with.] Prolog was just outside the city centre so we had a little further to travel and had to plan for this in advance. Arriving at 8 am, we proceeded to have our photos taken for our ID cards. Before filling out disclaimer forms, so we didn’t disclose any information about the company to their competitors.

After being given our photo ID’s to allow us to swipe in each morning, we were led on a tour of the facilities. As it was a logistics company, it was large, covering over 6 different sites and holding products from a variety of different partner companies. We were shown the range of methods used to process products and finally, taken to where we would be working for the next 3 days. Our team had an office to work in, fully set up with pens, paper, a flip-chart and computers. After compiling all our notes on the company we had gathered so far, we started work. As I was working on a bench marking analysis, my work was closely linked to the SWOT analysis. This meant I worked a lot throughout the days with Ryan, Sam and Michael.

The challenge passed very quickly as our whole group were very focused and enjoyed the work. We soon made light work of our challenges, finding lots of different ways to improve the company.

Final part coming soon...

The Presentation